Letters

Readers respond to recent Inc. articles, including the December 2000 column by Andrew Raskin, who stepped down as CEO of his San Francisco start-up, and to the November article about energy deregulation.

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Our mailbox overflowed once again with fan mail for columnist Andrew Raskin, who recently parted ways with the San Francisco start-up whose life he's chronicled for Inc. during the past year. While the letters to Raskin were lighthearted, other readers wrote weighty responses to our November article about energy deregulation.

Parting thoughts
In his December E-Diaries column, " I Really Must Be Going," Andrew Raskin said good-bye to Gazooba, the Internet company he'd cofounded more than a year earlier. After helping to hire a new CEO for the company, Raskin had decided to look for a new gig. Many readers wrote to wish him well and to offer him jobs. This one shared in the emotion of his departure.

It's rare that I ever write to a journalist. (I'll lump you in that category for now.) But my business partner and I have enjoyed your columns so much that I felt oddly compelled to tell you. She called me last week in a frenzy, saying, "Did you see the new Inc.?" It was hard for me to fathom what could produce such excitement on her part. We both enjoy reading Inc. as an informative business periodical, but rarely does it create the frantic urge to phone a friend. When she yelped, "The Gazooba guy is leaving Gazooba!" I instantly understood her shock.

We've consistently discussed and laughed about every article you've written and lamented when you were absent from the magazine. You've made us realize that the highs and lows we experience could be even more extreme, which has helped us to keep things in perspective.

We're sad to hear you're leaving Gazooba -- and sad about the name change -- but happy you'll still be writing. I think your next big thing should be writing a sitcom based on your experiences. The mime story certainly had Seinfeld-esque qualities.

Rebecca Labowitz
Co-Owner
Grow Inc.
Chicago

Split decisions
In her December article " The Two Loudoun Counties," reporter Anne Marie Borrego described the challenges one Virginia community faced as it tried both to protect its residents' quality of life and to support its growing business community. This reader recalled that Loudoun had struggled for balanced growth for quite a long time.

I moved to California in the early 1990s after living virtually my entire life in Sterling, Va., a town in Loudoun County. Each time I return to Sterling, I'm stunned by the changes that have occurred. Where there was once a field, there's now a mall; where there was once a forest, there's now a high school.

Having grown up in that area, I recall the growth-versus-nongrowth pressures. Even as a teenager I was fascinated with the land-use decisions that arose from those pressures. Last year, as I drove down Route 7 toward Leesburg, I wondered if those pressures still existed. Because of your article, I now know that they do.

Graham Mitchell
City Manager
Farmersville, Calif.

Law of averages
In December's cover feature, " The Best Cities to Start and Grow a Company in Now," we published lists of the most small-business-friendly metro areas as calculated by Cognetics Inc., an economic-research firm. We also showed how some cities had improved their rankings while others had slipped. One reader expressed confusion about the different lists.

According to your " 50 Best Large Metro Areas" list, Nashville is ranked 18th. But according to Emily Barker's box on " Big Cities that Plunged Down the List," Nashville is #16. We're wondering about the discrepancy, which for us puts all the rankings in doubt.

John Cummins
Managing Editor
Nashville Business Journal
Nashville

Inc. responds: This letter makes it obvious that we failed to include a footnote. We should have explained that the rankings in each column of the charts that tracked the rise or fall of cities on the list were two-year averages. We used averages to compensate for any unusual or one time occurrences that may have affected a city's ranking in a particular year. Although we listed both years in the column headings, we failed to indicate that the first number was the average of a city's rank in 1993 and 1994 and the second was the average of a city's rank in 1999 and 2000.

Know the SCORE
In his November column, " Help! I Need Somebody," Norm Brodsky encouraged new entrepreneurs to seek help from business veterans who could serve as mentors. One reader added a suggestion about where to find such free advice.

There are about 13,000 retired businesspeople with a wide range of expertise in SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), the free-counseling arm of the U.S. Small Business Administration. We're all over the country, so there is a SCORE chapter near everyone, and about 800 of us now do online counseling at the organization's Web site, www.score.org. The SBA also sponsors small-business-development centers, which operate primarily out of colleges and universities and use teaching staff -- including individuals recruited from professional and trade organizations, the legal and banking communities, and academia -- and paid consultants.

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